Dr. Frank's What's-it

Does this mean that you'll never make the Dr. title official? I think it'd be pretty cool to have you teaching my kid's history or politics class at a NoCal University a couple of decades from now. This is assuming of course that the record companies, magazines and MTV folks don't come to thier senses on your music ;)

Ah, academe. I join you, fellow-refugee Frank, in celebrating our escape from its Chardonnay-infused clutches. I think the author of this piece touches on many good points. I'm interested also in a historical study of this phenomenon. Long ago, academia was a bastion of conservatism, the mainstay of the WASP and "white shoe boy" elite. How long did this last? through the 20s? the 30s (when refugees from fascist and communist Europe came and shook up the establishment)? the 50s (when the GI bill democratized higher ed)? the 60s and FSM?

Also, I think different fields of study are more and less prone to uniform liberalism. American economics is notoriously free-market obsessed, with very little radical critique of capitalism. Science departments, I'd guess, might also be very different.

And, of course, the most lefty departments -- English is probably the biggest of these fields -- are almost uniformly liberal, but they're not immune to intellectual fights. All the people who agree that Bush is a dolt are more than capable of fighting over the legitimacy of deconstruction, new historicism, redefining the canon, etc. In fact, endless squabbles over the field you're in is one of the defining characteristics of American intellectual life. And let me tell you, these are not always friendly disagreements -- tenure may be essential for real intellectual freedom, but your colleagues can really begin to piss you off after 25 years of sitting in department meetings with them. To me the question is, why do the people who can disagree about almost anything not disagree about politics? I think some of the psychology of it might be that you need to agree with your colleagues about SOMETHING, and since you have a professional commitment to arguing about your field, you just slide into agreeing about liberalism so you have some sense of community with people. This might also be part of the explanation, along with what Bauerlein describes. Maybe it seems like some sort of deliberate attempt to upset what little collegiality remains for someone to want to pick a fight over politics.

What's Instapundit's day job again?

You know I love you, Dr. Frank. And it's not hard to identify a genuine left-wing tilt in academia.

But... Eugene Volokh, Dan Drezner, Stephen Bainbridge, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm, Victor Davis Hanson, Jacob Levy... I didn't have to use Google to come up with any of those names. If I did use Google, I'd be here all day.

If I look back at my own education and try to count, among my professors:

(a) the white males
(b) the non-whites or non-males
(c) the Marxists

I get a long list, a moderate list, and a list bereft of all but one guest lecturer. Does anyone have a list that looks too terribly different?

Ted,

I think the point Bauerlein was making had more to do with the uniformity amongst certain departments - no one's saying a university, even Berkeley, is 100% left-wing (remember John McWhorter?). What he's saying is that departments - which control tenure, bonuses, hiring - can subtly weed out non-believers. And of course, this happens on the other side as well. Phil Gramm and Texas A&M probably won't be hiring any Marxists for the poli sci department. Not because it's impossible to be a good scholar, but because they think the entire reasonable political spectrum fits between Newt Gingrich and John Ashcroft. For Bauerlein, in an English department, the realm of reasonability probably runs from Gramsci to Foucault.
One thing I like about this article, as opposed to the aggrieved bile in a David Horowitz article on the same topic, is that Bauerlein points out that this isn't malicious or even conscious. I mean, if I was a potential hire in an english dep't, and discussion turned to Hardt and Negri, what could I possibly have to say that they would recognize as a reasonable statement? If you think 'Empire' was pretentious cant, and said it outloud, there would be uncomfortable silences, maybe a sharp, hopeful laugh, more silence, an abortive attempt to talk about baseball or the weather, and then we'd scatter. I wouldn't blame them for not wanting to hire a guy they couldn't sit and chat with about the profession.

Well, Ted, as for (c), I guess you didn't go to UC Berkeley. I take your point, though: if I left the impression that I believe there are no conservative academics, I apologize. (Interesting, though, that, looking at your list, many of them are law professors. The reason that is interesting to me is that that was in fact the recommendation of the history professor I mentioned: he felt Law was a better fit. I probably should have taken his advice, too. And maybe my impression is wrong after all these years, but, for what it's worth, my honest recollection is that a budding historian who was not all that interested in celebrating the Triumphal March of the International Labor Movement throughout History was on a pretty lonely road.)

My point wasn't really about academe, though, but rather about the social dynamic that develops when you surround yourself with those who agree with you. Whether you're in an academic department, or a Starbucks, or a message board, or indeed even a blogroll, it tends to degrade discourse. My observation was that the cultivation of this process, whether intentional or otherwise, is particularly ironic when it comes to the Liberal Arts in higher education, and I stand by it.

I particularly like the two German academics referring to "American Genocide Day." I wonder if they have any cute names for the Holocaust? Of course, they probably don't have a holiday for that...

What does "classical liberal" mean?

Anthony:

When people say "classically liberal" they usually mean liberalism as they suppose the term was used in the 19th century. Though I realize the futility of trying to turn back the semantic clock, that's pretty much how I mean it: a more or less libertarian, anti-statist, non-collectivist, non-protectionist liberal temper or attitude which champions the rights and liberty of the individual and favors the Open Society against its enemies and "the masses against the classes" in the Gladstonian sense. The term "liberal" has many senses other than this in contemporary American culture, many of which are contradictory and some of which are paradoxically illiberal. Even its most common use as a term for the watered-down, conservative form of culturally chauvinistic social democracy which has taken up residence in sectors of the post-1968 Democratic Party doesn't seem quite appropriate. The only one of these contemporary meanings that I feel I can endorse without qualification is the "tolerance for loose morals, anything goes" philosophy that "liberals" are alleged to have, though convincing examples of the sincerity of this tolerance can be surprisingly rare.

I've noticed that I've experienced the "false consensus effect" concerning the topic of racism many times. For some reason it always seems to happen in the bathroom of public spaces that two guys (sometimes they appear to know eachother, sometimes not) feel they can make racist statements out loud when I'm in there, presumably because I'm white. Odd.

When I was in college, after three years of studying economics I took a philosophy course. A professor and I experienced simultaneous opposing false consensuses. I thought nobody was a Marxist and apperently she thought everybody was a Marxist.

By the way, the type of False Consensus that you're describing is a type of game-theoretic model called the Emperors Dilemma (the name references the Emperor's new clothes). It's actually a pretty cool explanation for a lot of things you see in the real world.